


Memories in Gold

by Saj_te_Gyuhyall



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Blanket Permission, Gen, Kintsugi/Kintsukuroi inspired, Minor Injuries, no canon characters whatsoever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 08:39:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11009880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saj_te_Gyuhyall/pseuds/Saj_te_Gyuhyall
Summary: So I was looking at some lovely Kintsugi/Kintsukuroi pieces and thinking about clones a few months back, and this was born. I finally finished it!Here, have a few thousand words of OC!Clone meets OC!Mechanic and there is a little healing through repairwork.





	Memories in Gold

 

Bleach’s flesh hand shakes as he holds the joint on his bionic arm in place, keeping the damn thing from falling off as he moves through the crowd. The hood of his worn brown cloak keeps his face in shadow and his shock of close cropped white streaked hair covered.

The freshly sealed incision on his head aches and he's going to be one giant bruise tomorrow from the impact of his hasty escape through the window of the little back alley surgery. It had only been from the second floor, but he’d landed in a pile of scrap below and he’d hit some hunk of mech junk and slammed his left side good. So much trouble for such a  ~~horrible, life stealing, murdering, monstrous~~  little thing.

Officially, the kriffing mind control chips in each and every surviving clones' brain didn’t exist, so a brother that wanted the damn thing _out_  couldn’t go to just any medcenter and get it taken out. Good way to end up right back in the empire’s loving hands, that.

The clinic (hah, kriffing joke of a name for that two room rathole) had been recommended to him by some of the locals as a place where the doc actually did have some training and hardly ever killed any of her patients. That part at least had been true.

The doc had turned out to be a thickly built, very dark skinned Zabrak woman with white circular tattoos and a decidedly gruff demeanor. She reminded him so strongly of his own company medic he could almost imagine it was Talkback snapping at him to ‘hurry up and get on the damn table, I don’t have all day’. It still hurt like a gut punch to think of him.

She'd brusquely asked him various questions about his reaction to drugs and taken a drop of blood to run through a small hand held scanner. After skimming the screen, she'd pulled a vial of clear yellow fluid from a drawer, and waved it at him.

"I'm going to give you a dose of this. It'll numb the nerves around where I need to cut, but you'll be awake and it'll wear off within the hour." She'd said. Then she had taken a needle, dipped the barest tip into the substance and lightly pricked the skin near his temple. After a moment she sharply poked the spot. It had been the weirdest damn thing, knowing the poke had happened but not feeling it at all.

The doc had nodded decisively, told him to hold still if he didn't want a lobotomy, and sliced in. The coppery tang of blood had filled his nose and he'd had to force himself not to twitch at the scent. A few tense minutes later, she had pulled the chip out, tossing it in a pan on the table where it hit with a small wet sound. He hadn't looked at it then, and had no idea what she'd done with it. Didn't care, either.

Half way through her brusquely delivered lecture on caring for the healing incision, a grubby looking human child (girl, boy, who knew under the dirt) burst through the door shouting about the local guard heading this way with half a dozen stormtroopers in tow.

The doc had cursed virulently, spun around to the rickety little table, and wrote something on a loose scrap of plas. Then she’d shoved it and a little jar of herbal antiseptic cream at him and told him to go out the back way, and go north. He’d grabbed his bag and cloak and headed for the far door, but shouts outside had had him slamming it shut just as fast.

A quick look around told him the only way out was gonna be up and maybe out that window he’d seen when he’d done a quick look around before he’d gone in. Amazingly enough, it had worked. He’d been able to dodge both groups, but damn he hurt now. And he didn’t know what he was going to do about his arm.

The little scrawled note had been an address and an imperiously underlined, GO HERE NEXT.

What the hells he figured. He doubted it was a trap. The little doctor seemed to have a pretty nasty dislike of the empire if her cursing was any indication. So, after circling around the blocks surrounding the clinic, he headed north.

  
_____________

 

He has to grin a little when he sees the place the note had led him to. Maybe the Force _is_  looking out for him.

‘ **AIDA’S REPAIR SHOP** ’ hangs over the door in neatly painted gold aurebesh with a passable sketch of an astromech under it.

The place is in a slightly more respectable area than the clinic had been. No drug addled sentients passed out in the gutters, no dealers and whores on the corners, and no trash carelessly left in the street, but there was still a slightly dingy quality to the place, as if it wasn’t very high on the list for municipal funding.

The shop had large display windows with heavy rolling shutters slid down over them and the ‘OPEN’ sign in the center of the door was dark, not lit. He kicks at the door anyway, in lieu of knocking, as his one good hand is still clutched on his prosthetic to keep it from coming apart completely.

After a moment his ears catch a slight sound from within and a little whirr above him makes him look up. He blinks up at the camera now pointed down at him and gives it a strained smile and nod.

“ ‘Lo there. Doc Deiiri sent me.”

There is a beat of silence then a speaker crackles to life near the camera. “Wait while I verify.” The voice is female and low, but that’s all Bleach can be sure about. He huffs, and leans against the wall next to the door.

It’s another couple of minutes before there is another sound from the speaker. “Please back away from the from the door.”

He does so and there are multiple clicks and the sound of what can only be a heavy bar being slid back. The door opens inward to a brightly lit interior, a small female humanoid backlit against the light. The figure surveys him for a moment, then steps aside and beckons him in.

Once in, without the light making it impossible to tell features, he sees that the person he’s been directed to (the Aida from the sign, he guesses) is a very short human of indeterminate origin. Her hair is dark brown and shorn nearly as short as his own, and her tannish skin is dotted thickly with spots over every bit he can see. Her dark brown eyes regard him with a kind of calm curiosity. She makes a shooing motion and he shuffles out of the way so she can shut the door.

And hells, that’s a lot of locks; six along the side and and one at each corner. And he had indeed heard a bar. It was a solid durasteel plank as thick as his wrist and as wide as his leg. His eyes dart around the door and note the extra deep setting and very sturdy looking hinges. If he had to guess, it would take a barrage or two of artillery fire to break it down.

After she has adequately bolted the door shut the woman turns those calm, curious eyes back to him. "I'm Aida Marshon. Deiiri says the local imps are looking for you and you need a place to hide out for a couple days."

He grimaces. "Empire hates to let go of it's clones. Dunno why they bother, 's not like we're more than canon fodder anymore."

She smirks a little, crossing her arms and looking up at him. "Might be something to do with how many of you end up defecting once you get those damn murder chips out of your heads."

"Maybe. I'm Bleach. Nice to meet you, Aida."

But Aida isn't really paying attention to what he's saying now. Her eyes have traveled down from his face and are now trained on the arm he's holding together.

She makes a small sound that somehow incompasses, 'Ouch, damn, and how the hell did you manage that' all in one. She peers at it for a moment then reaches out and pulls him gently toward the far wall, where a long, low slung table sits along it. A boxy offline astromech sits on one side, it's innards spilling out in a way that almost seems gruesome. Aida tugs Bleach over to the other end, which is strewn with tools and bits and bobs, but no gutted droids.

"Deiiri only said you needed hiding for a few days, not fixing."

"No, no, I won't turn down the use of some tools, but I can't afford to have it fixed right now. I need to buy passage off this rock soon." He protests.

Aida just shoots him an unimpressed look and presses him onto a low stool and carefully lays his broken arm on the table, prying his fingers away so she can get a good look.

She immediately frowns deeply, and pulls over another light, this one wrapped around a large magnifying glass on a bendable arm.

He knows what she sees. Beyond the very damaged joint, there are a slew of patch jobs on the outer casing, and inside where she can't see it's the same.

Aida traces her fingers along one particularly long crack he'd roughly bonded back together. "Anyone else would tell you that you need to replace this. It's pretty much wrecked."

Bleach opens his mouth, ready to protest, but she continues. "But I fix things, Bleach. When someone brings me something that has been patched and spliced and jury rigged a thousand times, I know that it's something treasured, something they don't want to lose."

Surprised, he closes his mouth. Then, hesitantly, "It's all I have left of them. I- she requisitioned the parts special, just for me. And Easy and Spyglass worked on it all the time I was in medical, just so I could start on physical therapy right away."

She nods. Aida doesn't ask who 'she' is, and she doesn't press for more details.

"I'll fix it for you." She holds up a hand to forestall any argument. "No money. This is a lovely piece of work under all the broken bits, and I'll be happy to do it in exchange for a little heavy lifting around the shop for the next few days, deal?"

He hesitates, then nods and they clasp on it.

 

____________________________

 

Aida gives him a temporary arm. It's a much newer model than his old one, and the difference is startling and hard to get used to at first. It moves so much faster than Bleach had become used to with his old arm. He hadn't realized how much he'd had to compensate for the lag of worn servos and gears. Even still, he can't wait to have his old one back.

While he waits for his arm and while he's stuck hiding in the small residence above the shop, he does busywork. The first day he'd lifted and moved everything too heavy for the small woman to her satisfaction. The next day, with nothing else to do, he'd tidied up her rather messy residence. She'd given him a bemused look when he'd asked if that was okay, but gave her permission. Sadly, that only occupied him for a day.

Then he'd gotten a good look at Aida's filing system and wanted to pull out his hair. Another hastily granted permission and he spent the next two days sorting plas receipts and invoices and client files. Because so much of what she did was under the table, and so many of her 'clients' didn't trust data filing, most of it was hardcopy. Ironic for people who wanted droids fixed, but people were strange.

"But what if someone goes through your files?" He'd asked, exasperated, as they shared an early meal of incredibly sweet kaff and spiced pastries.

Aida had shrugged. "It's not happened yet. And I don't actually keep any files for the clients I might get arrested over. "

Bleach grumbled about the sheer inefficiency, but went back to alphabetizing.

It took Aida five days to fix his arm. She had made no secret of her work on the joint and the interior circuitry and wiring, but she had spent the last day locked in her workshop, not allowing him to get even a glimpse of what she was doing to the outer casing.

  
He's breath caught in his throat when she presented repaired prosthetic to him.

"First I had to remove all of the solder and glue from your patches. Then I had to smooth the rough edges." She traces a finger along where the most obvious break had been, down the vambrace. " I know the colors have meaning for you, so I only buffed the scratches out and sanded down the edges of the paint so it won't chip off anymore."

The colors are more vivid than they have been in years, the white no longer a dingy shade, and the red like fresh blood, not the brown it had grown to resemble. Along each mended crack and break the colors fade to the bronzy copper of the alloy beneath, and each bit of damage has been filled with a vibrant gold alloy he's not familiar with.

"I'm good at what I do, Bleach." Aida says with no modesty. "This will stand up to any damage like it was new, I promise. And with the new bits I replaced the worn out things with, you'll have your old speed and range of motion back."

The arm moves smoothly and silently for the first time in what seems like forever as he flexes and twists it. "Why the alloy in the breaks? I don't think I've ever seen anything like it before. Why not fill them in with a matching color?"

Aida bites her lip and flutters a hand along one of the seams of gold, this one across the knuckles. "An old tradition from my mother's home world. She was from Alderaan, and there when something precious breaks it is carefully reassembled and the cracks filled with gold, or silver, or platinum. It's done to show that though something was shattered and then repaired, it is still beautiful and treasured. Still of use. It seemed appropriate." She explains. Then hesitantly asks, "Do you like it?"

Running his flesh hand along the length of his arm Bleach thinks of Knight Lasho. Her sharp teeth gleaming as she grins, the light of her yellow saber throwing a glowing tint over her blue black skin and trailing head tails. He thinks of her glee when she and his brothers presented him with the new and freshly painted arm and, for the first time since he watched her die under a hail of blaster fire ( _their_ blaster fire, _his_ blaster fire), he does not flinch from the memory of her.

He smiles at the little mechanic and nods. "I like it very much."

Aida grins right back.

  
_______________

 

Two days later he's laying in a cramped smuggler's hole on the saddest excuse for a ship he's ever seen.

He'd balked when he'd first seen the thing, but Aida had assured him that she'd been the Swiftlet's planetside mechanic for three years, and the ship was solid, and that captain Mykken is trustworthy.  
  
The ship starts to wake as the captain and his firstmate initiate the warm up sequence, thrumming to life with nary a hitch in the engines, which is reassuring.

Running an absent palm over his arm, he thinks back to the surprisingly strong hug Aida had given him and her wry crooked grin as she tossed, "Don't be a stranger if you're ever on Kaarma again, Bleach," back at him as she slipped through the hangar doors and out into the Kaarma City pre-dawn, morning mist shrouding her completely before she was five steps away.

Tipping his head back he grins as the ship jolts and judders it's way off the planet and into hyperspace and towards Nar Shadda. And then, who knew? Maybe he would find his way back to Kaarma someday.

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno if I'll ever do anything else with these characters, but I'm rather fond of them. I hope everyone else likes them too. If anyone has any ideas for them I'm happy to chat in the comments, or loan them out for use. ^__^


End file.
